Michael Prescott - Deadly Pursuit

Gazing over her shoulder, she saw no hint of the flashlight. No sign of movement There.

Spreading ripples in the water. A low, dark form perhaps a hundred feet away, moving toward her.

An alligator? Steve had said there were none on the island. But suppose he’d been wrong.

Didn’t look like a gator, though. It looked…

Human.

A man’s head and upper body. Ripples radiating from his arms as they cut the water in quick scissor-like strokes.

Was it Jack, his flashlight off? Or Steve?

She didn’t know or care. What mattered was only to get away, lose her pursuer down some side channel.

She swam faster, each jerk of her arms tearing a new ache out of muscles still sore from her ordeal in the radio room.

Ahead, the channel forked into two narrower passageways. Both routes receded into blackness. She went to her right.

A backward glance eased her tension slightly. Her pursuer was no longer visible. For the moment she had outpaced him, and he would have no way to know which route she’d taken at the point where the channel divided.

The creek led her past stands of dead mangroves, the ravaged victims of some recent fire perhaps sparked by a lightning strike. Their jungles of roots remained intact, forming the banks of the waterway, but their trunks were rotting, the branches leafless and splintered.

She swam on. The creek widened, deepening. Her toes tried to touch bottom, couldn’t.

Around her, more dead trees. Fire had gutted this entire pocket of the swamp. Even here, though, there was life. Orb weavers had webbed the sagging branches in gossamer; hermit crabs scuttled busily among the roots. In the water, tiny mangrove seedlings already had sprouted, promising renewal.

Though she had no love of spiders, crabs, or mangroves, life’s refusal to accept defeat heartened her. If the smallest living things went on fighting for survival against every obstacle, she could do no less.

A noble thought, rich with inspiration, but she had no time to savor it.

The creek had dead-ended.

A breath of angry sibilance: “Shit.”

She’d blundered down another blind alley. The wide, deep pool was hemmed in on almost every side by withered and toppled mangroves, the only opening the narrow passageway she’d taken a minute earlier.

Double back? Or wait here and hope her pursuer had gone the wrong way?

Neither.

He was coming.

She saw the glitter of ripples that announced his approach.

No way to get past him. And no time to climb through the trees and escape as she had before.

Motionless in the water, she was less easy to spot than he was. But he would see her soon enough.

She sank lower, the waterline rising to her chin.

From the far end of the pool, a whisper: “Kirstie?”

She breathed through gritted teeth.

“It’s me, Steve. I want to help you.”

Christ, the same line he used before. Did he think she was enough of an idiot to fall for it twice?

“If you’re here, answer me. Please.”

Fat chance, you son of a bitch.

She prayed for him to turn and leave, continue his search in the other channel.

“Kirstie…?”

He swam closer. Hell, he would be right on top of her in a minute. Couldn’t help but see her then.

Unless…

She drew a deep, slow breath, filling her lungs, then closed her eyes and gradually lowered her head beneath the surface.

Submerged, she was invisible. The turgid water, the color of dark tea, would conceal her as completely as a bath of ink.

The only question was how long she could stay under.

She waited, eyes squeezed shut, fighting the incipient panic prompted by the cutoff of breathing. Bubbles of air escaped her pursed lips and rose past her face to pucker the surface of the swamp. She could only hope Steve wouldn’t notice.

Seconds ticked past. She counted heartbeats, gave up after fifty.

There was no way to know if he was still nearby. She simply had to stay down as long as possible, then pray he would be gone when she finally surfaced.

Faintly she was conscious of a burning sensation in her chest. Her lungs were beginning to cry out for oxygen.

She ignored the warning, concentrated on staying calm. It was easier than she had expected. The warm salt water was the amniotic fluid of a second womb; suspended in it, she was an unborn child again.

An unborn child… with no umbilical cord.

The distress signals broadcast by her body became more urgent. Her extremities tingled. Her head pounded. She pictured her face turning blue, eyes bulging behind closed lids.

Better surface. But what if he was still here?

She could hold out a little longer. She was sure of it.

Arms folded, she hugged herself. No more air bubbles dribbled from her mouth. Her lungs were empty.

Irrelevant images began popping on and off in her mind like flashcubes. A birthday party, the children’s laughing mouths smeared with cake frosting. A clumsy kiss in a grade-school stairwell. Bleeding knees, scraped in a rough fall on a gravel path. The green campus of Amherst College. A golden retriever named Lancelot plunging into a field of summer dandelions. Steve, stiff in his tuxedo, guiding his bride’s hand as she cut the wedding cake.

Random memories, fragments of her life. She wondered why she so often visualized herself as viewed from a distance in those scenes, as if she had not lived her life at all, but had merely observed a story unfolding.

Lungs bursting now. Fire in her throat. Hands and feet numb. Freight-train roaring in her ears.

Oddly she no longer felt the desperate need to relieve these symptoms. Though her body was starving for oxygen, her mind seemed curiously detached, her thoughts drifting, drifting…

No. Snap out of it. And get oxygen-now.

She surfaced. Instantly her unreal calm was shredded as breath flooded her lungs. Shaking all over, fighting waves of light-headedness, she swallowed great gulps of air. The fire in her chest died down to embers, then to ashes. Her fingers and toes returned to life.

Only when she’d filled her lungs for the third time did she remember Steve. Dizzily she scanned the area.

He was gone.

She’d outlasted him. And nearly outlasted herself.

Jack paused, listening.

From a parallel channel, soft noises had risen a moment earlier: a muffled splash, an almost inaudible whisper. Sounds so faint he was hardly sure he’d heard them at all.

It made no sense anyway. Why would Kirstie whisper? She was alone.

Unless Steve was with her, had found her somehow.

Impossible. Steve was unconscious. He had to be.

Well, perhaps there had been no whisper. Perhaps he’d misinterpreted the sigh of the wind or the buzz of an insect.

One way or the other, he would find out.

He turned back, hunting for a passageway to the parallel creek. Yards of muddy water glided past, lined with misshapen trees. Somewhere a barred owl released a feline screech, its harsh cry scraping the night, fingernails on a blackboard.

Jack supposed most people would hate the swamp, would recoil from this place as if from a stinking carcass. Rot and mire, shadows and mist-nothing beautiful here.

But he felt a peculiar kinship with the swamp. Its comforting darkness concealed secretive, predatory things, hungry things that fed on weakness, things not unlike himself.

The swamp’s natural predators had eyes that saw in the dark. He had a flashlight. They had fangs. He had a knife, a gun.

How many rounds left now? Six, he calculated.

It would take only one shot to stop Kirstie’s heart.

Only one.

Kirstie pedaled water, catching her breath and clearing her thoughts.

Having failed to find her here, Steve must be retracing the route he’d taken, intending to explore the other branch of the channel. But at any moment he might return. She had to move on.